Northwestern University Press Research Articles

Reviewed by: The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden Christian Rogowski The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder. By Paul Dobryden. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. Pp viii + 208. Hardcover $120.00. ISBN 978-0810144972. The late nineteenth century saw concerted efforts in Germany to mitigate the destabilizing effects of unfettered industrial capitalism, such as environmental pollution and the unsanitary living conditions of an immiserated urban working class, by seeking to optimize efficiency in production (for instance, by reducing harmful waste) and by aiming to improve working and living conditions (primarily in order to maintain a productive workforce). In his introduction to this fascinating book, Paul Dobryden outlines how the medium of cinema that emerged during that same period can be viewed as an “apparatus of modernity” (10) that participated in this pursuit of “hygiene,” defined broadly as a conglomerate of practices that “strove to produce a kind of order, which in turn was meant to stabilize social life” (14). The multiple crises that followed the defeat of Germany in World War I confronted Weimar-era [End Page 320] cinema with the challenge of counteracting “environmental disorder” by contributing toward reestablishing psychological, social, and political stability—hence the book’s somewhat enigmatic title and subtitle. The author’s highly original, eclectic, and thought-provoking approach, combining sophisticated theoretical reflection with impressive archival research, enables him to address a dazzling multitude of fascinating topics in the book’s five chapters. In a brief review such as this, it is impossible to convey the full complexity of the book’s multi-layered and nuanced overarching argument. The first chapter is dedicated to the connection between the moralizing concerns of the Kinoreform movement and debates over the design of exhibition spaces during the transition from storefront movie theaters to large-scale picture palaces. The close proximity with other people in the insufficiently ventilated and poorly lit cramped spaces of early storefront cinemas exposed moviegoers to multiple “threats”—to their physical health, to their moral fortitude, and to their political reliability (as spaces of collective experience that potentially engendered politicized solidarity). The cinema thus became “a site where experts in design, architecture, traffic, and urban planning articulated a narrative of hygienic modernization and demonstrated hygienic ways of thinking about, perceiving, and acting in the spaces of everyday life” (38). The second chapter discusses the quasi-documentary genre of the Kulturfilme, educational films that sought to transform audiences into communities of self-regulating “hygienic subjects” functioning optimally within an existing social order. Such films, Dobryden rightly points out, largely adhered to patriarchal and ableist norms. For instance, women were generally relegated to the domestic sphere, with housewives instructed in using the ergonomically designed “Frankfurt Kitchen” to maintain order at home, while public spaces were primarily construed as arenas for the circulation of able-bodied working males, with the “unproductive” parts of the population (children, the elderly, the physically or mentally handicapped) sequestered in special spaces that purported to best meet their specific needs. Chapter three reads F. W. Murnau’s film Faust (1926) as a kind of double allegory—of the environmental pollution wrought by unregulated industrial capitalism and of the redemptive power of the cinematic imagination. Smoke and vapor fill the screen, visualizing disease and the devil’s shape-shifting magic in a manner that, through visual distraction, makes possible a distinctly modern cinematic magic. The fourth chapter applies ideas about disability and aging developed in chapter two to a discussion of two canonical Weimar-era feature films. In Dobryden’s readings of Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street, 1923) and Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), the modern urban environment emerges as the site that mercilessly excludes those who do not or cannot any longer conform to the “hygienic” logic of moral self-regulation or to discriminatory standards of workplace efficiency. The final chapter discusses key leftist films from the late Weimar period, such as Phil Jutzi’s [End Page 321] Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932). Rather than participating in efforts to mitigate the detrimental effects of exploitative industrial capitalism, these films shift the focus to...

Reviewed by: The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russiaby Anna Schur Muireann Maguire Schur, Anna. The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2022. xii + 224 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. W hentwo minor characters in Shakespeare's Henry VI(Part II) famously agree to 'kill all the lawyers', the specific source of their ire is lawyers' ability to alter lives by writing down words: namely, the fact that 'parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man' (Act IV, Scene II). Anna Schur's meticulously researched and subtly argued monograph does not, thankfully, endorse genocide of the legal profession. Instead, she explores, in the context of nineteenth-century Russia, the resentful perception of lawyers as pseudo-authors, whose powers of invention, imagination and rhetoric, freely exercised in the courtroom, allowed them to rewrite — and sometimes to undo — the lives of ordinary men and women. Schur's title, The Letters and the Law, introduces these two conflicting perspectives: that of writers, whose enduring post-Pushkinian status as their nation's conscience endowed them with quasi-legal, and certainly with moral, authority; and that of the newly formed body of professional lawyers, particularly defence attorneys, practising after court reform supposedly modernized the Russian judiciary in 1864. While we learn about individuals on both sides of the debate, Schur's focus remains on particular celebrity lawyers and the literary reactions they provoked from leading authors, during a time-frame bracketed by the 1864 reform and the 1905 Revolution. Within this timeframe, she revisits some of the remarkable epithets inveighed against the legal profession, all adopted and recycled by its critics, ranging from journalistic invective to literary caricatures. They included 'adulterers of thought' (a phrase Dostoevskii borrowed from another source for use in The Brothers Karamazov), the 'attorney-spider' and ' premier amoureux' (both coined by Saltykov-Shchedrin, referring [End Page 155]respectively to the unscrupulousness and ingenuous eloquence he attributed to different types of lawyer), and lirstvo(or 'lyre-playing' — Dostoevskii, again, inveighing against empty eloquence). All this obloquy contributed to the widespread public perception of all lawyers (but especially defence lawyers) as greedy, hypocritical and ignorant — a calumny often combined with antisemitic vilification. Ironically, as Schur shows, newly qualified advocates often modelled their own reputations on those of acclaimed authors, either by actually publishing literature or simply by attempting to accrue, through psychological insight, ethical excellence, or rhetorical brilliance, the magic dust of Russian writers' moral prestige. Other scholars have recently studied other aspects of legal-literary relations in nineteenth-century Russia — notably Harriet Murav ( Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), Gary Rosenshield ( Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, The Jury Trial, and The Law, Madison, WI, 2005), and most recently Claire Whitehead's study of nineteenth-century Russian lawyers who also penned genre fiction, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection(Cambridge, 2018). Shur's work is informed by all of the above, in addition to extensive study of Russian legal history. The Letters and the Law's original contribution is to show how the legal profession was conceptualizedin late nineteenth-century Russia. Chapter one surveys lawyers' experimental self-fashioning as moral and literary arbiters, drawing on contemporary speeches, memoirs and publications; some advocates were honoured with election to the Academy of Sciences (like Tolstoi's friend, the judge A. F. Koni, who also takes credit for sharing the anecdote that inspired the former's novel, Resurrection). Chapter two re-examines how the celebrated defence lawyer, and accomplished literary scholar, Vladimir Spasovich, won the lurid 1876 Kronenberg child abuse case in favour of the accused (rather like a negative of Atticus Finch). Schur evaluates successive polemics against both Spasovich's ethics and his eloquence, mounted by Dostoevskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Vladimir Rozanov, all pillorying the so-called 'Polish lawyer' (p. 58) for the very skills that won the case, and (in Rozanov's 1897 attack) for his implied claim to reputational parity with writers. Chapter three studies the negative clichés accreting around lawyers...

Northwestern University Press Research Articles

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Articles published on Northwestern University Press

Landscapes of Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Education: A Theoretical Examination of Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Education

Bakhtin between the Personalist Phenomenology and the Philosophy of the Novel

Levinas on the Primacy of the Ethical: Philosophy as Prophecy by JeffreyBloechl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022), x + 206 pp.

Review of Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (ed), 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

A vision of the next 3 years for The Journal of Humanistic Counseling

The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden

Minding the Shift: Some Thoughts on the Human and the Not Too Human Mind

Phenomenological and Dialogic Thinking in Spiritual Reading: Spiritual Paradigms of Selected Biblical Figures

Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature by AinsleyMorse. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. xiii + 251 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4327‐2

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by AnnaSchur. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. xii + 224 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4493‐4

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory: Folklore, Philology, Form by JessicaMerrill. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2022. 312 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4490‐3

Patrick M. BRAY, The Price of Literature: The French Novel’s Theoretical Turn , Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2019, 168 p.

On Crying While Stripping Wallpaper

Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin. By Brandon Woolf. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Pp. 280 + 23 illus. £89.95/$90.96 Hb; £35/$35 Pb.

Love at the End

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu (review)

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by Anna Schur (review)

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. By Anna Schur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. xii, 240 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00, hard bound; $39.95, paper.

Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds. By Tatiana Gershkovich. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. ix, 225pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00, hard bound; $32.00, paper.

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Northwestern University Press Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Northwestern University Press

Landscapes of Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Education: A Theoretical Examination of Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Education

Bakhtin between the Personalist Phenomenology and the Philosophy of the Novel

Levinas on the Primacy of the Ethical: Philosophy as Prophecy by JeffreyBloechl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022), x + 206 pp.

Review of Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (ed), 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

A vision of the next 3 years for The Journal of Humanistic Counseling

The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden

Minding the Shift: Some Thoughts on the Human and the Not Too Human Mind

Phenomenological and Dialogic Thinking in Spiritual Reading: Spiritual Paradigms of Selected Biblical Figures

Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature by AinsleyMorse. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. xiii + 251 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4327‐2

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by AnnaSchur. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. xii + 224 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4493‐4

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory: Folklore, Philology, Form by JessicaMerrill. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2022. 312 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4490‐3

Patrick M. BRAY, The Price of Literature: The French Novel’s Theoretical Turn , Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2019, 168 p.

On Crying While Stripping Wallpaper

Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin. By Brandon Woolf. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Pp. 280 + 23 illus. £89.95/$90.96 Hb; £35/$35 Pb.

Love at the End

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu (review)

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by Anna Schur (review)

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. By Anna Schur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. xii, 240 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00, hard bound; $39.95, paper.

Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds. By Tatiana Gershkovich. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. ix, 225pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00, hard bound; $32.00, paper.

About the Contributors